• Tech employees share their salary negotiation tips, which helped boost their pay by tens of thousands of dollars.
• Their negotiation strategies include practicing pitches, using data, and leveraging multiple offers.
• Research and transparency are key in negotiating better compensation in tech roles, they said.

Sarra Bounouh has worked at consulting giant Accenture and three Big Tech companies.

But she still deals with imposter syndrome, especially when talking compensation.

"Going into a negotiation is always, at least for me, a very uncomfortable discussion," Bounouh told Business Insider. "I just want to push through and ask for what I deserve."

She and four other tech employees from Meta, Google, and Cisco shared their salary negotiation tips before joining a company or when trying to get promoted. They have used these strategies to add tens of thousands of dollars to their original offers in recent years.

Product manager at Meta

Avoid offering the first number. If you must, back it up with research, said Bounouh, a product manager who joined Meta earlier this year.

She suggested using resources like Levels.fyi or Glassdoor and selecting your role and geography to see recent offers and compensation that makes sense for that job.

"I personally don't like having detailed conversations about level and compensation from that first call with the recruiter because I want to meet the team, I want to meet the hiring manager, I want to get excited about the role," she said.

Bounouh prefers to negotiate her level and compensation once there's an offer on the table.

She said she often gets asked about salary expectations early in the process because recruiters say they want to save time for both sides.

She politely declines to share a number by telling the recruiter: "I don't have a number for your right now. I will need to do some research before getting back to you. At this stage of the process, I'm more focused on meeting the hiring manager and team."

Rehearsal is key for conversations about promotions or raises, she said.

Bounouh said she practiced her pitch for every job after Accenture and increased all three jobs' initial salary offers: Microsoft by 32%, Snap by 19%, and Meta by 37%.

Product manager at Oracle

Internal transfers between teams or offices are also an opportunity to negotiate your compensation package.

Ketaki Vaidya, who moved from Oracle's India to California office in 2022, said she approached her negotiation with an "everything under the sun is negotiable" mindset.

First, Vaidya looked at Glassdoor and talked to people who'd made the move to gather salary data. She wanted to ensure she was getting a fair offer for the US' cost of living.

"I was being given this offer for the credibility that I had built in the organization. I felt like I had an upper hand in negotiating," she said. "I was much more confident in asking for the things that I deserve — so it ended up being a very smooth transition."

After negotiating her base salary up to $80,000, she discussed other compensation components, including the timing of her next review, sign-on bonuses, relocation costs, paid leave, and remote work. She negotiated a sign-on bonus of $15,000 and a relocation allowance of $15,000, which weren't part of the initial offer.

Now, her compensation is about $130,000 annually, including stock units and bonuses.

Product manager at Cisco

When Varun Kulkarni switched from consulting to tech to work on more artificial intelligence projects, he was careful not to come off as aggressive during his pay negotiations.

Once he had offers from Cisco and others in hand in 2022, he was transparent with recruiters and mentioned other offers, without introducing his own counter number.

He asked recruiters how high they could go and what they thought about other offers.

"You want to kind of not be too pushy" he said.

His offer from Cisco already matched the market rate and what several competitors were offering, but he managed to negotiate it by 5%, bringing his total compensation to $180,000.

Product manager at Google

During his 2022 recruitment process at Google, Yung-Yu Lin used his employer at the time, PayPal, to land better offers from both companies.

He interviewed and landed jobs at several places — but their pay did not compare with Google's offer.

Lin decided to negotiate a retention package. PayPal countered with a 10% pay bump. He then renegotiated with Google.

Google offered a 20% raise on his original compensation at PayPal, which brought his offer to the $350,000 to $400,000 range as a senior product manager, including stock-based compensation.

Software engineer at Meta

Hemant Pandey, a senior software engineer at Meta, used other offers and research in his most recent job search.

After two years at Salesforce, in 2021 he applied to Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and two other companies. He used offers from these companies to negotiate his compensation at Meta.

"Be very transparent that you have other offers. Even if you have interviews going on, mention those, because it's also leverage," he said. It signals to the recruiter that they have to move fast and work with your parameters.

Meta's recruiters matched the base salary and restricted stock units from the highest of all offers.

Aside from being transparent, Pandey said it is important to be proactive and research how compensation works in different companies. For example, candidates should compare how stocks are refreshed, he said. A refresher is when the stock option portion of an employee's compensation is updated.

"I also negotiated my sign-on bonus and said, 'Hey, at Salesforce, I'll be leaving my $30,000 to $40,000 of annual bonus if I join you. Can you help me accommodate that?'"

Pandey was offered $520,000 in annual pay, including stock options, in that 2021 move.

"The most significant thing happened in my career when I made the move from Salesforce to Meta, which was close to almost 80 to 90% hike" in pay, Pandey said.

Do you work in tech, consulting, or finance and have a story to share about your career journey? Please reach out at [email protected].

• I'm the youngest of three siblings — and the only Gen Zer.
• When I graduated this year, I faced the realities of job-hunting and adulthood.
• I learned lessons from observing my sisters and other millennials navigate their 20s.

After 16 years in the education system, my time as a student ended on a random Wednesday afternoon in April. I was finally free from lectures, tests, and group projects — but thrust into the realities of a scarier world: adulthood.

In this world, there were no set milestones to tell me I was on the right track. Everyone seemed to be on a path to something greater, but I felt directionless.

I know I'm not alone. Every 20-something has probably felt at least a little bit lost in life. But amid mass layoffs and the threat of AI replacing jobs, stepping into the job market as a fresh graduate in 2024 felt like diving head-first into an abyss.

An August report by an early careers platform, Handshake, surveyed 1,925 graduating students. They found that 57% of the students felt pessimistic about starting their careers — an increase from 49% of graduating students last year. Of the 57%, 63% said the competitive job market contributed to their pessimism.

The stress of not knowing whether I could secure a job was compounded by uncertainty about my career. I had studied journalism but wasn't sure if it was the right fit. I had the irrational fear that if my first job turned out to be the "wrong" choice, I'd be relegated back to the start line of the rat race.

Amid a brewing quarter-life crisis, I looked to my sisters, aged 28 and 31. They do many things that people of my generation may scoff at, like watching Instagram reels exclusively and using the laughing emoji. But they seem to have figured out one thing: life after college.

Here's what I've learned from watching them conquer the Roaring Twenties.

Life doesn't end when school ends

Toward the end of college, I mentally prepared myself for the fast-approaching expiration of youth.

"You must treasure your university days," relatives constantly reminded me at yearly Lunar New Year gatherings. They painted adulthood as a bleak portrait of bills, mundanity, and loneliness. So, when the time came, I was reluctant to let go of my identity as a student.

But as the youngest sibling, I also watched my sisters graduate from college, get married, and build their own homes. I saw them achieve promotions at work, find new hobbies, and start a life outside the one I knew of us growing up together.

Adulting isn't easy — I now know that. But there are also so many new milestones and freedoms that come with it, and there is so much to be excited about.

A job is just a job

My elder sister works in communications and the other in architecture. Even when their hours stretched into the night and weekends, they built a whole life outside work.

One started a sticker side business, and the other is now an avid runner.

It wasn't always smooth. My second-oldest sister burned out after working too much in her first job and took a career break. She prioritized work-life balance at her next job.

In that way, millennials and Gen Zers are alike. A 2024 report by Deloitte found that work-life balance topped the priorities for both generations when choosing an employer. When asked which areas of life were most important to their sense of identity, both generations agreed that jobs came second only to friends and family.

Distancing myself from the idea that my job had to be my one true passion lifted a weight off my shoulders. As much as I still want a job that gives me purpose, I also make time for other aspects of life that fulfill me, like working out and spending time with friends.

Just give it time

As with most worries, the fear that I'd never find a job was unfounded. In July, I started my first job as a junior reporter. But when the first day at work finally ended, I trudged home in a daze.

"I have to do this every day for the next 40 years?" I asked my second-oldest sister, who laughed. It wasn't that I didn't like the job. It was the change in routine from school life to a 9-to-5 that unsettled me.

"You'll get used to it," my sister said. Six months in, I still don't know if I will. But seeing my millennial counterparts thrive has encouraged me.

It's not just my siblings who have set an example. At work, my millennial colleagues are a constant source of guidance to the Gen Zers in the office. On social media, millennial influencers brand themselves as "internet big sisters" and give advice on navigating the complex years of their 20s.

Older millennials are now turning 40, but they were once in the position of Gen Zers, being scoffed at by the older generations for being "lazy" and changing work culture.

Now, they've drawn the map for Gen Zers' entry into the strange world of adulthood. It's made adulting just a little less scary.